For the would-be spaceship named the Dream Chaser, everything on the first flight of a prototype
went perfectly — until the craft touched down, toppled on its side, skidded off the runway and
wound up in the sand of the Mojave Desert.

The unmanned test flight, conducted in hushed conditions on Saturday at Edwards Air Force Base
in southern California, came to an inelegant end after the left landing gear failed to deploy
properly.

But the creator of the space plane, Sierra Nevada Corp., which is hoping to win a NASA contract
to carry astronauts to the International Space Station, found much to celebrate despite the rough
landing.

The vehicle, dropped by a helicopter at 12,500 feet, flew autonomously in a steep dive, pulled
up perfectly and glided to the centerline of the runway, the whole flight precisely by the book
until the very end, said Mark Sirangelo, head of Sierra Nevada’s space unit, in a teleconference
yesterday.

“We had a very successful day with an unfortunate anomaly at the end of the day on one of the
landing gears,” Sirangelo said.

Sierra Nevada has spent most of a decade developing the Dream Chaser, which looks like a
miniature space shuttle. It would be launched atop an Atlas 5 rocket. Like the shuttle, it is
designed to glide back to Earth and land on a runway. It hasn’t yet flown in space; the first such
mission, unmanned, likely will take place in 2016, Sirangelo said.

NASA says it has given Sierra Nevada $229.1 million through the end of September under a series
of agreements.

SpaceX and Boeing also have received subsidies.

SpaceX, founded by tycoon Elon Musk, is already taking cargo to the space station and hopes to
add astronauts to its manifest in the near future. Boeing is an aerospace giant for which human
space flight is essentially a side business.

Sierra Nevada, however, is more narrowly focused.

“We’re not trying to land on the moon or Mars. That’s not our mission. Our mission is to take
over Low Earth Orbit so that NASA can go on and do something else,” Sirangelo said earlier this
year.